The Presentations Japan Series

Can A Presentation Be Conversationalist And Still Be Business Professional?   Sometimes we read that when we are presenting it should be just like a conversation with your friend. The idea is we should be relaxed, inclusive, totally focused on the people we are speaking to.  Now will that work in the boardroom when presenting to the senior executives, none of whom are particularly friendly?  Will...

Tag Team Pitching For Fun And Profit   In business, we are asked to present as a team.  We may be pitching for new business and the presentation requires different specialist areas of expertise.  This is quite different to doing something on your own, where you are the star and have full control over what is going on.  One of the big mistakes with amateur presenters is they don't rehearse.  They j...

Inject Yourself Into The Presentation Content   When we are presenting, we can be mentally separating out personal selves from the content of the talk. There will be facts, data, statistics, details, examples, evidence, etc., which is all rather far removed from the individual presenting.  It is almost like we are doing third person presentation rather than first person. Technical people in partic...

Shooshing Your Noisy Audience Is Ridiculous When Presenting   When a presentation event unintentionally turns into comedic relief, you know you have a major credibility problem.  Imagine it is after work, a cavernous hall filled with hundreds of people, the booze and small talk all free flowing.  The MC attempts to introduce the main host of the event, to make some worthy remarks. The hum continue...

Bland Is Bad When Presenting   Smart, capable people amaze me when I see them presenting.  This recent speaker was someone I had met in business a few times previously and this was my first time to see him present.  In our earlier conversations, he was knowledgeable, intelligent and professional.  He was an experienced person in his industry and had substantial international work exposure.  He was...

Don't Get A Grip When Presenting   Good posture never goes out of fashion.  Standing up straight shows confidence, allows good breath control and projects energy. Given this is pretty simple, then why is it we get this so wrong when presenting?  The problem is temptations aplenty in the presenting environment.  The various acting awards or music performance awards are broadcast all around the worl...

Go Broad, But Also Go Deep When Presenting   When you hear an excellent presentation, it is easy to be well satisfied.  When you are giving such a presentation and the audience are wolfing down your information, it is also easy to be self satisfied.  The good is the enemy of the great we say, don't we.  The difficulty is when things are going so well, to know exactly how to take them to a higher l...

Vacuum Up Cool Stuff for Your Presentations   Do you have one of those diaries that includes a daily quotation on the page?  Or maybe you subscribe to a service that sends you uplifting quotes?  I have noticed that social media is also a great hunting ground for cool quotations too, as people share them around.  We probably note these and then move on with our lives.  For the presenter though, the...

How To Liven Up A Speech You Have To Read   Watching a friend of mine deliver his speech to my Rotary Club reminded me of the perils of reading speeches.  In his case, he was giving the speech in Japanese and so he chose the route of linguistic perfection over audience engagement.  We do this in our own language too when the speech content is complex or of high sensitivity.  Politicians have learn...

The Importance of Analysing Your Own Presentation Performance   The presentation has come to a close and we are relieved it is all over.  We pack our stuff up and get back to work.  Back to the office now and the emails have been flooding in during our absence, there are meetings a plenty to join and tonnes of projects begging for our attention.  The memory of having done the presentation quickly...

How To Speak To 5000 People Audiences   The chances of this happening and happening regularly are remote for most of us.  The happening regularly part is the key, because when you are dealing at this scale, you need to get practice to really master the big stage. Nevertheless, in case you find yourself in front of a very large audience, here are a few hints on how to adjust to the increased size o...

Presentation Practice Frequency   The usual frequency for most people for giving formal presentations is once in a blue moon.  In other words, we don't do so many in a year. This presents a problem, because as we know, repetition is key to learning and improvement.  If we were giving formal presentations 50 weeks a year, we would see remarkable improvements as we honed our craft.  In business thou...

How To Get Self-Belief As A Presenter When You Don't Have Any   We don't get the chance to do so many public presentations in business, so it becomes a hard skill set to build or maintain.  The internal presentations we give at work tend to be very mundane. Often we are just reporting on the numbers and why they aren't where they are supposed to be or where we to date are with the project.   These...

How To Rehearse Your Presentation   We have planned our talk, all we need do now is deliver it.  We have designed it, starting with the key punch line we will deliver in the first close of the speech, before we get to the Q & A.  This is the essence of our message and it is from this key idea that we have derived the key talking points we want to make, that will be the "chapters" of our speech.  I...

Rhetorical Questions When Presenting   Are we talking at people, to people or with people when we are presenting?  The "talking at" part is easy to pick.  There is no attempt at rapport building with the audience.  No stories and lot and lots of data dump going on. Technical experts love this type of presentation, because they can spend all the time sharing the data.  Because they are an "expert"...

Giving Presentations: It Is Harder Than It Looks Folks   When you are an instructor and coach for presenters or a regular presenter, you tend to be immersed in that world and your sense of the degree of difficulty involved becomes numbed. I was reminded of this when we were doing a video shoot in Japanese the other day.  We have employed an actor to appear in our videos advertising our core course...

I've Got My Eye On You   Eye line in Japan is a tricky subject.  This is a non-confrontational, high harmony, consensus culture.  Looking people straight in the eye is just too aggressive for polite society here.  Children are taught to look at the forehead, the chin, the throat rather than the eyes of the person they are speaking with.  This idea carries on into established and accepted societal...

Outstanding Japanese Presenters   I spend a lot of time complaining about how poor is the professional quality of presenters in Japan. It is true, so when you come across people who can present properly, it so refreshing and gives you hope that the rest of them can do it too.  I attended an American Chamber event here in Tokyo recently and the speaker was the President of Nestle Japan.  In fact, M...

Powerpoint Free Presentations   Visuals on a screen are very powerful communication tools when presenting.  Being able to show graphs can really drive home the point. If numbers are not so easy to follow or accessible, then proportion differences, trend lines, bars, pies, colours can be persuasive.   Explaining complex sequences with diagrams is good too.  This makes the potentially confusing more...

How To Select Data For Presentations In Business In Japan   How much is enough data in a presentation?  How much is too much?  Generally speaking, most presenters have a problem with too much, rather than too little information.  Your slide deck is brimming over with goodness.  And you just can't bring yourself to trim it down. After all the effort you went to assembling that tour de force, you wa...

Presenting In Business in Japan   Japan has some particular ways of doing things.  We say "when in Rome, do as the Romans do".  That would be extremely bad advice when it comes to presenting your solution to buyers here.  Japan is the country of Zen, which holds simplicity at it's centre.  You would never know that though, when you look at typical business presentations.  The slide deck is a mess....

How To Read Faces When Presenting In Business In Japan People staring at you intently when you are presenting can be unnerving. This is especially the case when we are already feeling nervous to begin with. If some of those faces in the audience look particularly hostile, then the level of inner tension can be reaching danger point. We are stressing ourselves in reaction to how we perceive the aud...

Being Persuasive In Business In Japan   Business schools are teaching put up your conclusion first in the Executive Summary and then the evidence and argument follows in the main body.  If we are writing something for others to read, then this is absolutely terrific.  If it is a report on a market's potential or how the product launch fared, this makes a lot of logical sense.  Busy people want the...

Presenter Survival Tips For A Tech Meltdown   When the tech crashes, you shouldn't crash and burn with it when presenting. Absolutely ALWAYS get to the venue early and check the equipment. Remember, you are in an alien environment, being served by people you have never met before. Who knows how old the technology they have is or of what quality level is the equipment.  The people setting up the ta...